The internet increasingly pervades our lives, delivering information to us no matter where we are. It takes a complex system of cables, servers, towers, and other infrastructure, developed over decades, to allow us to stay in touch with our friends and family so effortlessly. Here are 40 maps that will help you better understand the internet — where it came from, how it works, and how it’s used by people around the world.

1. How the internet was created. Before the internet, there was the ARPANET

ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, was an academic research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the military known for funding ambitious research projects without immediate commercial or military applications. Initially, the netowrk only connected the University of Utah with three research centers in California. ARPANET was a test of a then-novel technology called packet-switching, which breaks data into small “packets” so they can be transmitted efficiently across the network. It also had a more practical goal: allowing more efficient use of expensive computing resources. Computers scientists sometimes used ARPA money to buy computers, and the agency hoped that ARPANET would allow universities to share these expensive resources more efficiently. One of the first ARPANET applications was Telnet, which allowed a researcher at one ARPANET site to log into a computer at another site.

37. Watch people wake up on Twitter

One of the amazing things about the internet is the way it permits the collection and aggregation of large-scale data about human behavior. For example, this map shows where people are tweeting about sunrises over the course of a 24-hour period. There’s a yellow flash of sunrise tweets whenever the sun rises above the horizon in a part of the world.

40. Languages of the world according to Twitter

Here’s another map showing which languages people around the world use online. Each dot on the map represents a cluster of tweets, and the color represents the language spoken in those tweets. English is ubiquitous online, so Fischer chose a neutral grey color for it so it wouldn’t overpower the other colors. Fischer didn’t explicitly label the countries on the map, but it’s still easy to see national borders. You can also seem significant linguistic minorities. For example, if you click the link for the full map, you can see where people speak French in Canada.